Google doesn’t have access to personal profile updates because of Facebook’s agreement with Bing, and for that I’m glad. I like using Facebook to quickly get in touch with all of my friends, but I’m sure items that my friends share with me (like updates on their pregnancy, clumsy moments, etc) are not ones that they want found via a Google search.

If you have personal profiles elsewhere you might want to be careful of what you post where, and adjust your privacy settings appropriately. In December 2009 Google announced that it would add data from Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Indenti.ca and Twitter to its search results (and now Google Buzz of course). From an organizational perspective, this is good news if your deploying good SEO practices to your updates on those sites. For a person, you just want to be a bit more careful about what you share with the world.

The recent news around PleaseRobMe is a perfect example of this. As a single woman, I’ve always been wary of revealing too much online about where I was physically in the world, and this site has been broadcasting when people update via their Twitter account from geographic locations that are not their house – announcing to the world that their house is up for grabs from a robber’s perspective.

When social media sites and search engines change their privacy policies so frequently, it’s certainly hard as an individual to keep up. Perhaps when everyone’s information is public we will stop caring?